


que sera sera

by brella



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: 5 Times, F/M, Gratuitous Shmoop - Freeform, It'll Be This Thing - Freeform, Making Out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 16:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1824742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don’t look at Casey like that. This wasn’t <em>her</em> idea. (It was.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	que sera sera

Don’t look at Casey like that. This wasn’t _her_ idea. (It was.) She didn’t _plan_ this. (For longer than a couple of days.) She’s smarter than this. (Most of the time.)

“You want to what?” Hunter stutters, but he kind of loses that last consonant because his pencil falls out of his slackened hand, so it trails off into more of a, “You want to _whaaaaa_ uuhh?”

Casey screws her eyes shut and drops her face into one hand.

“It’s not a big deal,” she tells him, but her involuntarily gritted teeth reveal that it very well might be. “Think of it as like—crossing something off of a bucket list.”

“Your bucket list,” Hunter says, “Involves—that? With…” He glances around the room, then, wide-eyed, points to himself, mouthing an incredulous, “ _Me_?”

Casey shakes her head, struggling to keep from slumping over at the desk. She never should have brought this up. Or at least she should have phrased it better.  

“Not with _you_ specifically,” she retorts, seeing him wilt a little in her peripheral. “With anyone. At any time.” She puts both of her hands on her face this time to hide the heat crawling up it. “Never mind; forget it.”  

A palpable silence grows between them, reminding Casey eerily of a previous moment of strained and awkward quiet that had compelled her to make a previous stupid decision. She chews her lip, hunching back over her Trigonometry textbook and trying to look busy. She briefly wonders what keeps possessing her to study with Hunter when she knows that it almost always results in being alone in the same room as Hunter, and talking to Hunter, and addressing some elephant in the room or another with Hunter, and ultimately wishing she had never met Hunter, or had at least met Hunter in a different life wherein they were not imprisoned at a murderous, brainwashing boarding school and she was the only one competent enough to fix that little problem.  

“Could you just,” Hunter ventures suddenly, but Casey gives nothing away, writing out a formula as though he hadn’t said anything at all, “Repeat it?”

Casey halts, making a face. Her nose wrinkles briefly with incredulity.

“What for?” she scoffs, side-eyeing him.

He gesticulates in a circle several times before blowing some hair out of his face and scratching his head, pointedly darting his eyes in any direction that isn’t close to hers. The growing redness of his face is starting to give his sweater a run for its money.

“I just wanna make sure I didn’t have a… small, temporary brain aneurysm,” he explains. “Because it kinda felt like I did, when you, um, said that. When you said the thing you said.”

“That’s not even remotely something that happens,” Casey deadpans.

Hunter winces. “Well… it could?”

Casey huffs, leaning back in her chair with her back straight and folding her arms in an attempt to look serious and unruffled. She closes her eyes under her frown.

“I said, ‘I’ve never been kissed; maybe we could try it.’”

She blurts it out at a speed that honestly makes her feel more like she’s taking a page out of _his_ book than anything else, which frankly worries her. There it goes. _Hello, darkness, my old friend_.

“Before we… die here, or what?” Hunter finally rasps, and then clears his throat.

Casey’s head whips around immediately to skewer him with a sharp glare.

“We are _not_ going to die here,” she says.

“Right, of course.” Hunter’s laugh is nervous and feigned and his attempt at a nonchalant wave of the hand is even more so. “But, like, just in case.”

“Just in case,” Casey agrees with a stern, single nod.

“Just in case,” Hunter repeats.

“Right.”

“So…”

“So.” Casey shifts slightly in her chair, tightening her grip briefly on her sleeves. “So never mind.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, _why_?”

“Well, I don’t know!” Hunter throws his hands out in front of him, open palmed, and moves them in and out, as though there is something very large and obvious sitting on the desk in front of them. “It’s already out there, isn’t it? So we may as well, you know, discuss it…”

“What is there to discuss?” Casey demands, unable to keep the annoyance from her voice. Hunter had trailed off into a barely audible mumble, so the volume of her response makes him jump in his seat. “Okay, you know what, I lied to you. Temporary aneurysms _are_ possible. I had one a few seconds ago when I brought this up. Now I am un-bringing it up, so let’s just go back to talking about the law of sines before we end up getting quickies in broom closets between classes like Ike and Jade.”  

Hunter’s eyes are protuberant and astounded. “Were you really thinking that far ahead?”

And damn it, he got her. She feels her ears start to get inexplicably warm.

“Maybe?” She huffs, finally slumping forward and dropping her face into one hand, elbows propped up on the desk. “Look, we’ve already been over this; we _know_ this is a bad idea—”

“I mean, it doesn’t sound _that_ bad…”

“No.” Casey bangs a fist on the table to try to drive the point home to herself and Hunter jumps. “This is a terrible idea. I’m serious. This is a DEFCON-2 terrible idea.”

“I do not know what that means,” Hunter confesses. “Wait, wasn’t that in _Watchmen_?”

“It’s an America thing,” Casey sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “DEFCON stands for defense readiness condition and it’s a scale used to measure levels of preparedness to defend against nuclear war. DEFCON-5 is the lowest, DEFCON-1 is the highest.”

“So then what’s DEFCON-2 supposed to stand for?” Hunter asks, not sounding especially enthusiastic to hear the answer.

Casey scowls at the wall. “Next step to nuclear war.”  

“Wow.” When she finally, subtly peers over at him in her peripheral, she sees that his hand is on the back of his neck, and he’s limp against his chair, knees askew, staring at the ceiling like Nietzsche probably stared into the abyss. “So… kissing me would be borderline nuclear holocaust. That’s… um. Thanks?”

“It’s not that exactly,” Casey tries to explain, keeping her eyes trained on a crack in the plaster in front of her. “It’s just, you know. Kissing can sometimes lead to… other things. Things that really would not be smart to get involved in right now.”

She should probably be worried that she can instantly read his silence as scandalized.

“Not like that,” she groans. “Not _those_ other things. I mean… feelings.”

“Feelings?” Hunter asks, strangled.

“Feelings,” Casey says.

“Feelings.”

Casey glares swiftly over at him. “Polly wanna cracker?”

“Sorry,” Hunter says sheepishly. Casey forgets to look away from this time; he’s gazing thoughtfully at his lap, fingers fidgeting against each other, one foot tapping to a silent rhythm. His watch face glints in the light from the desk lamp. “I just, uh. Feelings.”

Casey softens.

“Yeah, I know,” she murmurs.

Hunter seems to debate something very heavily, eyebrows knitting together in a frown, hand drumming briefly against his knee, lower lip going between his teeth, before inhaling sharply and locking eyes with her, shoulders straight with resolve.

“Is that what you’ve been worried about this whole time?” he asks a little loudly, so that she leans back an inch or so. “Feelings?”

Casey refuses to answer that. She shakes her head wordlessly and, in lieu of a proper response, makes a _ttch_ sound between her teeth, throwing her hands in the air and pushing the chair back. She stands, crossing the floor with her elbow in one palm, combing errant hair out of her face.

“Because if you want to try it without the feelings, we could do that,” Hunter says behind her, and she stops.

She hears movement—the slow and heavy drag of chair legs on the hardwood floor, the shift and rustle of fabric on a rising body, the subdued exhale of breath from anxious lungs. She pivots around so abruptly that her hair swings over her shoulder and spills down her front, tightly curled and untamed. Hunter is standing a couple of paces behind her, hands in his pockets, watching her with something in his eyes that she can’t read, something she should really be able to, because Hunter is the open book and she’s the unfathomable mystery on two legs and this has taken quite the unexpected turn.

And she doesn’t think she objects to it. Oh, God, what has she just gotten herself into.  

“Okay,” she answers, weighing the situation into which they’ve both just stepped with those two syllables. “Okay. Let’s do that.”

Hunter looks even more startled than she feels, all round eyes and a floundering mouth. She feels a little like she’s just issued a challenge, and maybe that’s the best way to handle this in the first place.

“Wow. Wow, um, okay, yeah.” He nods rapidly. “Like… right now, or…?”

Casey stares him down, tacking on an air of indifference when she shrugs and retorts, “Sure. Right now.”

She would laugh at how much her unwavering alacrity is clearly knocking him into a state of shock if the air between them wasn’t suddenly so thick. Without taking her eyes off of him, she lowers herself into a sitting position on her bunk, expertly concealing a wince when the back of her head hits the bottom of the bed overhead. When he doesn’t do anything beyond standing ramrod straight and blinking owlishly at her, she nods to the empty space beside her.

He gives a start and points to it. She sighs and nods again, slower this time, just in case he misses it somehow. She is quickly starting to consider changing her mind, but, after a couple of seconds, he steps hesitantly closer, closer, before plopping down beside her.

The bed makes a rattling noise. Casey, in spite of herself, splutters out a laugh at Hunter’s remorseful grimace. When the noise subsides, they both settle, side-by-side and facing the opposite wall where the closed door is, Casey tugging at a loose thread on her skirt, Hunter examining his watch with painstaking attention.

Coyness is not something Casey would ever want to have a presence in her repertoire of marketable skills, but come on. She’s never done anything like this before. The whole first kiss thing had seemed inane at best when she’d had good grades to bring home and tomes on quantum physics to read, and absurd at worst now that she’s basically living out _The Prisoner_ , so she’s really got nothing to draw on here to make her seem sage or collected, but somebody had reminded her recently of a little philosophy called _carpe diem_ that she hasn’t been able to get out of her cluttered, sleepless head.

The point is that it actually takes some effort on her part to breathe in deeply and turn her head noticeably enough in Hunter’s direction that his gaze meets hers, that he knows what she’s getting at, what she wants (or thinks she does).

She tries to evaluate his lips from afar; they look dry and pink and his tongue makes an attempt at wetting them, fleetingly, so that she’s not even sure if she’d seen it.

“So…” she prompts him, ducking her head, raising her eyebrows.

He gulps.

“No—yeah, here, uh—here, I’ll start,” he offers, gesticulating aimlessly in several vague directions, from himself to her and back again before darting a hand to the back of his neck and scratching it.

Casey takes a breath and nods silently, as coolly as she can, shifting. She faces him, one leg sliding up to rest sideways on the mattress. Hunter’s ears go bright red and he clears his throat, a loud sound that emulates a cannon firing in the heavy silence. Casey blinks expectantly at him, dipping her head a little, and he blows out a quick breath before scooting closer to her, bunching the sheets as he goes.

When he twists slightly around to try to fix them, his hand bumps into hers, but as he moves to shoot it away on instinct, she stops him, fingers closing around his wrist. She can feel his pulse hammering lightly against her thumb, and it makes her own heartbeat jump. His red hair has grown out a little since she met him; it grazes his eyelids.

She holds her breath, waiting for something in the air to change. Hunter’s eyes are trained stubbornly on her knee, and she wouldn’t even know that he was breathing if she couldn’t see his stomach moving in and out slowly; the ticking of her alarm clock matches it.

He leans in a couple of inches, stops, goes redder. Curls his fingers in, his free hand wiping at his pants leg. Leans in a little more, pulse leaping, before halting again, drawing air in shakily. She keeps waiting, an unfamiliar practice, watching him with half-lidded eyes.

She squeezes his wrist fleetingly and it seems to spur him into moving again, but it doesn't really matter—she inclines her body a little awkwardly to meet his head where it tilts because she doesn’t feel like waiting anymore and then his mouth is on hers, still and unsure.

Everything inside of her shudders for a single charged second. She moves first, lips sliding tentatively over his, five fingers gripping the fabric of her skirt.

His mouth is dry, so the kiss sticks strangely; she has to fight a little to do anything beyond staying still, and that annoys her, so, without thinking, she wets his lips with her tongue, losing track of it when they part with a quiet gasp. She sees the opportunity and cranes forward, languorously skating her tongue over his teeth, stopping at the canine, her body shifting closer to him still until their shoulders are touching. It’s less of a kiss and more of a question, painstakingly slow, teetering on the edge of something unseen.

His hand slides up her arm and her shoulder and stops at her neck, tangling fingers into her hair, and she hums approvingly, finally closing her eyes.

It's... nice.

That’s right when she feels a painful, prickling yank at the base of her scalp and a minuscule snapping. Cringing, she breaks off with a whisper of, “ _Owowowowow_ …”

Hunter's watch is caught in her hair.

"Oh no," Hunter mutters, starting to move his arm away like it _won’t_ just jerk her head to the side, which it does. “Oh, wait, shit—hang on, let me—”

“No,” Casey talks over him, flapping a hand when his movements tug her awkwardly forward, “ _Hunter_ , no, stop—”

“I got it—”

“You're _literally tearing my hair out_ —”

“No, it's okay, I can fix it!”

“No, you can't—”

“Just hold still, the clasp is a little—”

His left elbow hits her square in the face when he reaches clumsily over to try to free her. He yelps out an apology and she groans, one hand flying to her nose.

“Stop!” she finally shouts, and he freezes. “Hunter, just stop for five seconds; I can _get it_!”

The sharpness of her voice leaves a hard echo, and she feels the slightest pinch of guilt at how quickly the tone shuts him down, but only the slightest, because it’s not until Jade gets back from classes about ten minutes later that she’s able to free herself from Hunter’s watch anyway, and by then, the mood has been effectively mercy killed and has what looks like zero chance of ever, _ever_ being resurrected.

So Casey deals with it in the only way she knows how when it comes to Hunter, when it comes to the things inside of her that jump when he looks over at her for too long. She pretends it never happened.

 

* * *

 

“You really don’t have to keep doing this, you know,” Casey sighs, another variation on familiar words, no longer bothering to inject any semblance of exasperation.

Hunter’s sneakers make the slightest squeaking noise on the linoleum of the empty hallway, and the noise, for some reason, tugs a small smile onto her face when she glances at him out of the corner of her eye and sees that he’s holding the back of his neck with one hand, eyes downcast bashfully.  

“Doing what?” he asks.

Casey snorts. “Walking me back to my room after every meeting?”

“Are they meetings?” Hunter inquires in a blatant effort to avoid the question. “Sounds pretty official.”

“Hunter.”

He smiles lopsidedly at her when she narrows her eyes at him in mock scrutiny, and he shrugs, releasing his neck to tuck his hands into the pocket of his hoodie. Up ahead, she sees Jade slip into their room, closing the door silently behind her; Ike, Jun, and Guillaume are already out of sight, but their door is slightly ajar; the faint glow of a night light fills a sliver of the dark dormitory wall.

“Have you ever considered that I might just be walking back to my own room at the same pace that you’re walking back to yours?” he asks, trying and failing to sound detached. “I mean, we kind of _are_ neighbors.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Casey says.

“You think it’s all just a bunch of crazy people howling at the moon,” Hunter provides instantly.

Casey elbows him. “ _X-Files_.”

Hunter snickers. “Yeah…” He wiggles his fingers at her, voice wavering with theatrical eeriness. “If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe yourself, Agent Scully.”

Casey laughs even though it’s late and it could get them caught and Hunter’s references to _The X-Files_ aren’t all that funny and it’s even less funny that she can actually follow them. The sound, and the light feeling with it, only lasts for a moment, before it’s accompanied by the rushing memory of clutching to the leg of her father’s jeans in the spooky darkness of the TV room when he’d shown her the first episode on VHS, and the smile slips away from her face in what she hopes is an imperceptible change.

She comes to a stop in front of her door, angling herself slightly away from him before he can notice the difference. She reaches for the doorknob, fingers coming to a lingering rest on it, before reconsidering and half-facing him again, infinitesimally biting her lip.

“Too bad they don’t let us have Netflix in this place,” he’s saying, as carefree as ever. “Otherwise I would definitely propose a marathon.”

As it is now bizarrely wont to do, the body memory of his mouth stuck chastely to hers, his palm laid warm and still against the curvature of her jaw, washes through her, stopping at her throat until it closes for an instant. He looks adorable with his unguarded smile and his loose shoulders and his untidy hair catching the faint orange glow of the night light.

Without thinking, she vaults herself across the few inches between them on her tiptoes until her lips stop on his cheek, until her nose bumps into the skin there, so quickly and so precisely that it leaves a soft popping noise when she draws away again.

There isn’t a second’s pause before Hunter turns his head, stops her retreating face with a hand at the nape of her neck, and tugs her back. Their mouths meet and it’s perfect, the equivalent of a bull’s-eye, no clumsy misses or chapped surfaces, like they’ve done it a hundred times.

Casey’s fingers fall away from the doorknob to grip the shoulders of his hoodie. She groans contentedly, tongue pushing his lips apart, and then his hands are framing her face and she feels her back flatten against the wall until the hem of her sweatshirt rides up a little. Hunter tilts his head to better take advantage of her inviting mouth, her uneven breathing, his tongue on her tongue, hot and smooth and pushing steadily, and it vaguely occurs to her that he’s probably been thinking about doing this every day since they’d first tried, because there’s no other explanation for how _good_ he suddenly is and how fast her heart is slamming against her ribs and how warm she suddenly feels from the belly down and _wow_ —

“Wait, shit, I’m so sorry,” Hunter suddenly breathes against her still agog lips, and only then does her mind catch up to the fact that they aren’t kissing anymore, even though his fingers are still in her hair and his forehead is pressed to hers, even though she’s involuntarily pulled him so close that their stomachs are flush against each other’s. She can feel him breathing and she relishes the way that it trembles through his body. “I didn’t—I didn’t even ask you if this was okay, I just went and did it, that wasn’t cool…”

“What?” Casey mutters, all brilliantly.

Hunter shudders out a sigh and closes his eyes, disentangling one hand to smooth some of her hair down against her cheek, against the space behind her ear. She loosens her vice grip on his hoodie, swaying slightly now that she’s actually making an effort to breathe normally again.

“I should’ve asked,” he explains, sounding a little delirious. “I should’ve asked if it was okay to just—kiss you like that. I’m sorry. I should’ve—”

Casey takes him back hard, teeth bumping against his, earning a heavy whimper from him that makes her shiver. She smooths the spot of impact with the tip of her tongue, snaking arms fully around his shoulders, eyes closing, and he murmurs her name in a breathless moan before—

“What’s all this now? You pair are out past curfew—”

“ _Ohjesus_!” Hunter yells, springing away from her with arms flung, and Casey lets out a wordless yelp to accompany him, ducking even though there are obviously no projectiles being sent her way.

“— _And_ breaking a number of student conduct guidelines, namely section four, detailing overt displays of affection—”

Hunter is clutching his chest, gaping in something equivalent to terror at the bald and unimpressed-looking security guard who is shining a discerning flashlight down onto him and Casey.

“—As well as residence hall etiquette regulations, namely section five, detailing interpersonal relationships and cohabitation—”

“We weren’t cohabitating!” Hunter protests in a strangled voice. “We’re neighbors! It was an accident!”

Casey glares incredulously at him, trying in vain to fix her mussed hair and hopefully tamper down her flushed cheeks.

“A likely story,” the guard says, drawing out the words and narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “An accident. Rich! Back into your rooms, the both of you. Mark my words, if I catch you again, I _will_ be writing you up to your Resident Advisor.”

Casey and Hunter exchange what she can only assume are identical looks of horror and vague mortification. She straightens her sweatshirt, brushes her hair behind her ears, clears her throat, fumbles for the doorknob, and practically leaps into her room; and beyond that, well, easy.

She does what’s best, factoring in the possibility that any further physical interactions of that caliber will earn them unwanted attention from the staff, which are the _last_ thing they need now that they’re actually forming a coalition to take down the Academy from the inside and burn everything they love to the ground and all that. She pretends it never happened.

Nobody ever said _all_ of her plans were good ones.

 

* * *

 

Her shirt is off and Hunter’s mouth is amazing and their homework is open and unfinished on the floor and they’re on Jun’s bed. And, by the way, this is a terrible idea.

Casey’s eyes roll back into her head when Hunter kisses her neck, slow and tarrying spots of heat on her bare skin that make her toes curl. She tips her head back and her body follows until she’s prone on the mattress, messing up Jun’s pillow, knocking his alarm clock onto the floor. Hunter stops, leans over, picks it up, puts it back on the bedside table, and goes back to work, mouth closing, hot, sucking, around her earlobe. She wants it a hundred other places, wants a multitude of things she really shouldn’t. 

Terrible idea—

His shirt is off, too, incidentally. What, did you think Casey Blevins does anything that isn’t a fair trade? Come on; give her some credit.

Hunter hasn’t touched her sports bra, hands instead moving with practiced concentration along her elbows and forearms and shoulders and sides, which she is definitely not complaining about, but she’s been beginning to suspect ever since she shouldered off her t-shirt that he is either debilitatingly single-minded or just straight-up blind. His sweatpants shift against hers when he follows her down onto the mattress, and she forgets about criticizing his performance, forgets about the fact that Ike is probably only going to be out at dinner for another fifteen minutes, forgets about everything except the dig of his fingertips into her ribs and the sound her name makes when he breathes it hoarse and low in her ear.

Shit.

He tries to adjust himself so that his knees frame her hips, but, being Hunter, loses his balance, toppling over with a yell and banging his head against the wall and effectively removing his mouth from her throat, which is the only place it should be at this exact moment, thank you very much.

Casey stuffs a fist over her mouth to stifle her laughter.

“That’s a real smooth move, Hunter,” she tells him, not even bothering to hide her amusement. “I can tell you do this a lot.”

“Accident,” Hunter squeaks, one finger raised for emphasis, the other hand rubbing the spot on his skull that had collided with the wall. “I think I might have a concussion.”

“From that? Not likely,” Casey scoffs. Jun’s bed is as narrow as every other twin XL in the dorms, an unsurprising fact, and she and Hunter barely fit onto it, so their legs are kind of enmeshed and he’s having trouble extricating himself from the accidental cage.

Casey is equal parts turned on and annoyed. This keeps _happening_ , this inevitable descent from well-intentioned studying plans to sloppily making out like a couple of horror movie leads with a death wish, and while she has long since abandoned the futile effort of pretending it’s an inconvenience, she has not yet abandoned the effort of pretending it’s a metaphorical Jenga tower of bad decisions, because, oh yeah, she doesn’t _have_ to pretend, because it _is_.

As usual, Hunter’s brain seems to catch up to what’s happening and he immediately looks thunderstruck, one hand flying to his forehead.

“Geez,” he wheezes. “We did it again. We did the thing.”

“Yep,” Casey replies, still lying down, with her hands now folded at her stomach instead of stroking the skin of his back. She pops the last consonant, hoping it will get rid of the heat still pulsing in her chest and in her abdomen and between her legs. It doesn’t.   

Hunter drapes an arm over his eyes and sighs. Casey sets her jaw and raises her eyebrows, nodding in agreement.

This could be the part where they talk about it, where they hash out what keeps dragging them together; this could be the part where Casey stops going out of her way to avoid broaching the subject at all costs, an instinct she will never understand, because she’s faced down Georgina Daramount on multiple occasions without batting an eye and yet is petrified by the possibility of _talking about her feelings_ with a boy who, quite frankly, couldn’t even scare an infant if the chips were down. This is a golden opportunity. This could be it. All right, one, two—

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Hunter blurts out.

The words, whatever they are, fade and die in Casey’s throat. She rolls her head to the side, blinking at him, lifting and dropping her cheek infinitesimally to smooth down a fold in the pillowcase. Hunter’s eyes are closed, and his thumbs are tapping pensively together; they’re close enough that she can see his crooked eyelashes, can see the thin shifting of the skin of his eyelids.

She doesn’t even want him to talk; she just wants to kiss him again. Angrily, she claps a hand over her mouth.

When he doesn’t expound upon the statement, she lowers her arm and gently nudges him in the side.

“Go for it,” she prompts him.

His eyebrows twitch together. She mentally indexes all of the spots on his face that she wants to touch her lips to, the single freckle under his eye, the soft bit of skin next to the corner of his mouth, his left eyebrow, his nose.

“It’s…” He chuckles weakly, eyelids lowering, watching his hands. “You probably won’t believe me. It’s dumb.”

Casey follows his line of sight and her focus falls on the gold watch still fastened to his wrist. Unable to keep the question back any longer (and she deserves _some_ credit, because she’s been very patient about not bringing it up until this point), she points to it and demands, “Are you ever going to take that thing off?”

Hunter gives a small start, blinking rapidly at the object in question like he’s forgotten it’s even there. He lifts his arm, surveying the glint on the metal surface from the bedside lamp.

“I mean, if you can’t read it, why even wear it?” Casey adds. Yeah, she knows about his little timekeeping problem; he is surprisingly keen to share secrets with her, even though most of them are boring, like the fact that he peed himself on a rollercoaster once (she’d tried to make him feel better by admitting that rollercoasters make her puke), or that he accidentally stole from a Tim Hortons once because he meant to pick up the pencil case he’d set down but grabbed a pack of make-at-home coffee instead, a crime that still haunts him to this day.  

“It’s—kinda hard to explain,” Hunter answers, avoiding her eye.

“No, I’m curious,” Casey pushes him, propping herself up on one elbow to better give him a probing frown. “You’re always saying the thing’s cursed; I don’t think I’ve ever seen you use it… what’s the deal?”

“There… isn’t one? It’s really nothing,” Hunter insists, but the attempt at a jocular smile he gives her is strained. “Geez, Casey, it’s just a watch. It’s just my watch. I just like wearing it. It’s not a big deal, right?”

Casey has no idea why, but it is suddenly the biggest deal she has ever encountered. Hunter has spoiled her with honesty, it seems, because the fact that he’s keeping something from her now is enough to sour her temper. And she knows it’s hypocritical; she’s barely told him anything about herself for fear that it will mean something; maybe the problem is that she’s sick of not knowing things in this stupid place, unwilling to confront the possibility that she can’t read everyone, that she doesn’t have a way out of everything. She does nothing to hold back the glare rapidly tightening on her forehead, and Hunter notices instantly, worry overtaking his eyes.  

“Sure,” she barks. “Not a big deal. Not even a little.”

In what can only be described as a huff, she pushes herself up on her palms and maneuvers herself off of the bed, so roughly that the mattress creaks, stooping over to start gathering up her clothes from the floor. The heat in her face is no longer pleasant.

“Hey,” Hunter calls softly, and that makes her bristle even more, that he isn’t even angry at her. “What’d I do?”

Leaping straight to self-blame. Typical.

“Nothing,” she flings back, wrestling her shirt over her head, not even noticing that she has it on backwards. “I’ve got work to do. A lot of work. I don’t have time to hang out, sorry.”

“Hang out?” Hunter repeats in a dull whisper as she stands.

Spitefully, she thinks, _You’re the one who wanted to try this without feelings_. (She wonders, many times after, what might have happened if she’d said it out loud.)

She’s not normally such an awful liar. She storms out without taking her notebook or her satchel or anything else, slamming the door behind her.

Ike is on the other side, his room key poised at the level where the doorknob would be, and he doesn’t look even remotely surprised to see her leaving with her clothes on the wrong way and her face flushed and her hair tangled and her feet bare.

“Trouble in paradise?” he coos with a shit-eating grin on his face, waggling his eyebrows.

Something really must be wrong, because all she does is flip him off over her shoulder, halfway down the hallway before he even hits the third syllable.

She sees a small red mark on the side of her neck the next morning and only takes it in for a second before fishing out her concealer. She pretends nothing ever happened that time, too. This is becoming a problematic habit.

 

* * *

 

Silence, all at once boundless and contained. One cumbersome beat of the heart, one more. Then everything explodes.

Casey grabs Jade’s hand and hauls her along when she leaps behind the thick line of trees, scorched air hitting her from behind. It’s just in time, too, because the blast had shattered the greenhouse into what must be a million shards that embed themselves into the ground and the woods and thankfully everything that isn’t Casey’s skin or Jade’s or hopefully anyone else’s. The force sends a violent gust through the branches, shaking the leaves until their clamor mingles with the painful ringing in Casey’s ears; Jade’s fingers clutch hers so tightly that it hurts, and even though Casey’s curled protectively into the fetal position she still doesn’t let go, and she doesn’t realize that she’s gritting her teeth until her jaw starts to smart in protest.

This was a terrible idea.

 _Jun’s_ idea.

The bedlam subsides after a few seconds that seem altogether more like a few days. Casey tentatively lifts her sweaty, soot-smeared forehead away from her locked knees, gripping Jade’s clammy fingers unrelentingly. Smoke spills between the trees and she coughs roughly, trying to wave some of it out of her face.

“Casey,” Jade chokes, sounding muffled and far away. “Casey, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Casey answers, nodding through her watering eyes. “I’m okay.”

She can’t see a goddamn thing; the haze of the smoke is consuming her line of sight and making her eyes leak and the only thing she’s sure of is that something is on fire somewhere, because she can hear it, crackling and whooshing somewhere behind her.

“Me, too,” Jade tells her hoarsely. She coughs, finally releasing Casey’s hand as she presumably pushes herself off the ground and turns to survey the damage. “Shit. It’s totally gone.”

“What did this accomplish?” Casey wheezes, dropping her face into the dirt sideways and panting. “He’s insane. He’s literally lost his mind. We’re not hanging out with him anymore.”

“Well, he did say he wanted to burn everything they loved to the ground,” Jade says. She still sounds winded. “Best to start with the fucking horticulture, I guess.”

“I can’t believe this,” Casey grouses, finally exhaling heavily and starting to lurch to her hands and knees. “This was supposed to be reconnaissance. Simple reconnaissance. He and Hunter were just supposed to go in there and—”

It catches up to her with what feels like as much impact as the explosion had. She whirls, ponytail flying over her shoulder, and surges to her feet, sprinting harum-scarum back toward the open field in spite of Jade’s shouts for her to wait. Ike’s words from a few weeks prior reverberate against the back of her skull: _Trouble in paradise?_

She messed up. She messed up. She messed up so bad—

She breaks out of the forest edge to find a heap of smoldering nothing where the greenhouse used to be, smoke and embers rising into the vast starry sky overhead. Across the clearing, she thinks she sees Ike surveying the damage with his arms slack at his sides, and Jun is standing next to him, coughing into his elbow, clothes blackened and torn; Casey practically flies at them, legs burning, lungs constricted, rage overwhelming.

“ _Jun_!” she screams, all fury, and Jun barely has the chance to frown disgruntledly up at her before she’s vaulted herself at him with every intention of tackling him to the ground.

She’s not even thinking straight; if she was, she’d know that such an attempt would be impossible, which it is; she slams straight into Jun and he stumbles a few steps back, but nothing more. Without missing a beat, she swings a fist at his face with a shriek.

He catches her wrist before she can hit him. She writhes.

“Calm down,” he orders.

“The hell I will!” she snarls, clawing at him until he grabs her other hand, too. “What the fuck did you do?! _Where is he?!_ ”

“Stop,” Jun shouts over her. The word is hard and feels like a slap to the face. “Stop it. Don’t make a scene.”

“Make a _scene_?!” Casey screams incredulously. “ _Who just blew up the fucking greenhouse, asshole?!_ ”

“I believe that Casey’s agitation is stemming from a very particular source here,” Ike comments. Casey does her utmost in her current position to somehow hurl her leg back to kick him in the crotch, but fails. “Now, now, Casey, let’s take this one step at a time—”

“ _Don’t_ make me come over there, Ike,” Casey snaps, rearing her head back to glare fully up at Jun, baring her teeth, still thrashing to get free. “I don’t know who you think you are or what you were trying to pull off with this, but I _swear_ to _God_ , if—if he…”

She can’t finish. _She messed up so bad._

“I have to be honest, this dramatic side of yours is most unbecoming,” Ike says. “And I normally like them a little rough, too. Anyway—”

Jun’s eyes bore into Casey’s unapologetically. His mouth is in a flat, somber line, and his eyebrows are furrowed. There’s a bleeding cut on his cheek. Looking at him, looking at the complete lack of any promise in his stony expression, her stomach is starting to sink, further and further down, without grace or composure. She can’t explain why her face is streaked with something wet and warm.

This is pathetic. She manages to pound a fist against his chest, but the force is feeble and halfhearted.

Jun finally breaks the eye contact, glancing down at his feet, eyelids lowering.

“I’m—sorry,” he murmurs.

Casey feels rather than lets her eyes go wide. Loss is a strange feeling, one she’s never been very good at handling; she still refuses to acknowledge that her parents might not be here anymore, forever convincing herself that it doesn’t matter because she’ll just _fix it_ , go back and undo it like it never happened; she wonders if this, right now, this all-consuming sensation of foundering, of bewilderment and disbelief and a petulant child’s stalwart refusal, is it. She wonders if this is what those… encompassing sorrows of death are supposed to feel like.

Ike clears his throat delicately and taps a finger on her shoulder. “Hate to rain on the already very stormy parade over here—or, well, I suppose it’s more of a procession—but—”

“Shut up,” Casey croaks, mortified at how broken her voice sounds.

“A decent proposition,” Ike replies, “But there’s just one thing—”

“ _Ike_ ,” Casey growls, whirling on him, but she pauses, frowning, when she sees that he’s pointing over her shoulder.

“Worry no more,” he tells her, smirking, “For I have located your man.”

“I’m sorry,” Jun repeats, back straight and chin held high like an especially dignified lion about to accept punishment. “I should have told you that I was planni—”

Casey claps a hand over his mouth, muffling the last of the words. He makes an indignant noise, but she barely hears it; her gaze riveted, wide-eyed and disbelieving, on a figure picking its way over the rubble of the charred greenhouse beds, brushing soot and dirt off of itself. Orange hair catches the smoldering light even through the smoke.

“Jun, buddy,” Hunter is saying, sounding exasperated, “There’s a little thing called ‘subtlety’ that I think we should talk about…”

His name bursts out of Casey before she can stop it, and then she’s running toward him, vaguely wondering what the hell she’s doing, what the endgame is when she actually reaches him, and all too soon she’s a couple of steps away from him and he’s gawking speechlessly at her and she could just keep going and throw her arms around him like this is the goddamn stupid movie they belong in, but—

She comes to a sharp halt just in front of him, panting quietly, hands starting to reach for him but thinking the better of it and retreating again. She swallows. His green eyes are nothing short of perplexed, maybe a tinge of concerned.

He clears his throat and shifts, avoiding eye contact with her and rubbing the back of his neck, blowing out a breath.

“Are you mad?” he mumbles, grimacing as if in preparation for the right hook he seems convinced is about to hit him right in the nose.

“Am I what?” Casey rasps in disbelief.

Hunter clears his throat again, eyes rolling skyward in obvious avoidance.

“Okay, okay, we should’ve told you,” he admits, speaking quickly. “We should’ve told you we were going to deviate from the plan but Jun wanted to keep it a secret because he didn’t want anyone to get hurt but I didn’t want _him_ to get hurt so I just went along with him and didn’t say anything because—because I, well, the moral of the story here is that nobody wanted anyone to get hurt, and I’m sorry for going behind your back but I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal since we haven’t been talking since that… thing happened, and actually on that note this was supposed to be an apology present since I can’t get flowers out here, like oh, look, I can sabotage the Academy, too, I hope you like it and you forgive me because I…”

Casey grabs his face with both of her hands and drags him forward, kissing him wet and open-mouthed and without shame, nostrils flaring at the singed smell of him and the sound of her name when he breaks off and murmurs it against her teeth. There’s no technique to it, no practiced motions; she’s all over him, one hand slipping down the back of his shirt, the other pressed along his jawline, swallowing down the air he breathes (the stifled, barely audible sound of a hazy and heady " _I lo—_ " that she isn't ready to hear). Within a few seconds, by the time he's holding her waist, she's half-laughing, swooping up to peck his face in a dozen different places.

“My God,” Ike exclaims from a few feet away, faking offense. “ _Really_? Show a little decency. Or at the very least a little _restraint_.”

Jade hisses at him to shut up. Casey’s mind catches up to her and she slows, face stopping against Hunter’s neck, fisting fabric of his shirt in both hands and shuddering out a ponderous sigh.

“I think I hear guards coming,” Jun tells them. “I’m going to take cover. Follow me if you wish.”

“I’ll find my own hiding place, thank you,” Ike quips. “You’re a kicker.”

“Now is _not_ the time,” Jun growls.

“Idiots. Come on,” Jade orders them, and Casey hears their footsteps starting to recede back to the woods. Jun knows an alternate path back to the school that should be free of guard patrols; they’ll be able to get back to their dorm rooms without detection if they hurry.

“Was that—” Hunter whispers, sounding astonished. “Was that just… were you just freaking out?”

“A little,” Casey mutters. “We should go.”

She gives herself to the count of three to release him and step back and compose herself.

It takes her until the count of four.

 

* * *

 

It’s late. Casey moves her lips slowly, slowly over Hunter’s, a languid ebb and flow, grazing his soft lower one with her teeth, applying the smallest nudge of pressure. He hums and sighs and runs a hand down her hair, coming to a stop at her mid-back, drumming indolent fingers against her spine. It tickles. She snorts in spite of herself, craning her head back to smirk down at him. He stares back at her, pupils blown, dazed and a little reverent, Adam’s apple dipping when he swallows.

“You’re—” he starts to say, and then apparently reconsiders, turning red and glancing away.

They’ve been doing this for a while. Avoiding revelations of anything emotionally incriminating, yes, but also sneaking into each other’s rooms whenever their roommates aren’t around. Which is a really strange thing to be tasking to when they’re also writing up violent escape plans and conspiring with Hunter’s strange AV Club connections to serialize a secret newspaper that could get them killed, but… trauma skews people’s priorities, okay? It is _not Casey’s fault_.

Casey likes the feeling of being on all fours over him, every inch of his body open to her. His shirt is still on, but it’s riding up so she can see red hair trailing in a line down to the hem of his gym shorts from his navel. His stomach rises and falls as he breathes. His watch is on the bedside table.

“The best?” she replies smugly, tilting her chin. “Yeah, I know.”

He reaches up and frames her face with his hands, tucking some of her hair behind her ears. She wishes he’d knock it off; she hates the way her ears stick out when they aren’t covered up.

“Well, yeah,” he concedes like it’s obvious. His thumb strokes a short line along the skin under her left eye. She grins, cheek filling his palm. “But—”

Just then, Jun’s alarm clock starts beeping at a frankly ear-splitting volume, its glowing red numbers reading a solid _9:00_. Casey and Hunter let out identical startled yelps and flail toward it in unison to turn it off, but this is a stupid idea because they’re still halfway entwined; Hunter sits up at the same time Casey leans down and their foreheads crack together.

“Ow—sorry!”

Casey gasps, the hands presently clutching her face going rigid. Hunter reels back, cursing. The alarm clock keeps screeching.

After a few seconds of motionlessness, Hunter fumbles around until his hand finds the snooze button and slams a fist down on it sideways. The room plunges into silence. Hunter seems to be bracing himself for something, eyes squeezed shut.

Casey stares, bug-eyed, agape, at the insides of her blinding hands. Her heart jitters in her chest and the spot where Hunter’s head had slammed into hers twinges, although not painfully.

Stranger things have happened, she thinks inexplicably.

“Oh God,” she finally murmurs. “Hunter.”

“Yep?” Hunter replies stiffly.

“Look at me,” she tells him, and lowers her hand.

“What—” Hunter is cautious, but still fails to conceal the vague beginnings of exhilaration in his tone. “I thought you didn’t have time for a…”

_It’ll be this thing._

Casey breathes in deep until there’s no room left inside her body.

She moves down, hair spilling over her shoulder, heart surging with something new and unbreakable that will never belong here, here where things die and everything is transient.

She closes her eyes and opens her swollen, waiting mouth. He arches up to meet her.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no one to blame but myself and [Bombay Bicycle Club](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLSEH4Bbb8A). (And, partly, Macey? But that's not news.)


End file.
